In my view, expressed here before, HuffPo cynically exploits other news organizations and writers by scraping their content and relentless (laughable once you twig to it) SEO-pimping. The decline in quality has been noticeable, and fighting that by pinching MORE stuff from others and token linking is weak sauce. See also:Plagiarism as a business model.

Here’s a post by online columnist Simon Dumenco writing at AdAge who objected to heavy-handed appropriation of his content and received an ‘apology’ with news that Huffington Post had ‘suspended indefinitely’ the underling writer who did it … ignoring the oh-so-obvious fact that she was merely doing as she had been shown to do in the culture of Huffington Post.

One of the great and pressing questions of the post-blog age is: What constitutes unfair — unethical — aggregation? In the absence of a clear legal framework (the “fair use” doctrine in the U.S. is notoriously mushy), a lot of media people tend to use the “I know it when I see it” standard, echoing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s wry 1964 declaration about what constitutes hard-core porn.

Bill Keller, the outgoing editor of The New York Times, knows sketchy aggregation when he sees it. In his column in the Times Magazine in March, he famously attacked certain aggregators for “taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy.” He then added, “The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington.” …

Good, very self-aware and self-deprecating comment from Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera, which nails a distinction I tried to explain on Twitter yesterday, when I said
“HuffPo’s m.o. changed. Became greedy to hang on to traffic. Less willing to (at)tribute to source.”

Let’s call rewriters “rewriters”, not “aggregators”…

What irked me was the reminder that “aggregator” is a rather broad-brush term that paints systematic news-rewriters like the Huffington Post (who bury links) as cousins to snippet-quoting sites like Techmeme and Mediagazer (which link prominently). Dumenco’s piece, whose subtitle begins with “The Blog Queen Defends Her Aggregation Practices” also cites Bill Keller’s famous column from earlier this year, entitled “All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate”, which goes as far as coyly utilizing the term “aggregate” repeatedly as a euphemism for “steal”.

Since all “aggregators” are now tainted by association, I’m wondering if we should start using a different term to describe what we do at Techmeme. Something more specific, like “headline aggregator”? Or “link curator”? Meanwhile, can we all just call the rewriters “rewriters”? Aggregation is not the essence of what they do.

Did the Huffington Post Make a Big Mistake by Suspending an ‘Over-Aggregator’? — Daily Intel, NY Mag

This sent more media websites into a tizzy. Gawker’s Ryan Tate found some HuffPo writers who claimed that, in fact, this type of speed-and-aggregation-at-all-costs work is exactly what is taught to new employees. One staffer even said that he or she was “livid” at the suspension. “That is what we were taught and told to do at HuffPost,” the staffer told Tate. “Arianna and the higher ups made a decision to stop linking out directly as much and rewrite stories ‘the way the AP does.’” Dumenco was also displeased — he thanked Goodman for the apology but then asked for the writer to be reinstated. He also asked that the Huffington Post apologize to a bunch of other sites, including our own (thanks, Simon!), which he thought had been similarly taken advantage of.

Goodman has drawn a line in the sand here. Now that someone’s been suspended so publicly, every time there’s a similar “over-aggregation,” complaining websites could expect similar repercussions. Now that the site has admitted a weakness — one that can be traced throughout — the vultures have started circling. …